Akamai And Turner Sports Bring Live Streaming

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leader in powering video, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, announced today it will serve as the exclusive live video streaming provider to Turner Sports for the official PGA Championship App available on the App Store. The 91st PGA Championship will be held August 13-16 with 18 hours of television coverage on TNT complemented by four video streams of live coverage exclusively on PGA.com.

The PGA Championship iPhone App for the iPhone and iPod touch supports Turner Sports’ integrated broadcast strategy of combining traditional television coverage with online and mobile components to provide fans with a multiplatform experience. "Turner Sports is known for its innovation in presenting content across multiple platforms, and this is another example of that strategy," said Tim Napoleon, Chief Strategist for Digital Media at Akamai. "Organizations like Turner Sports are leading the charge with live streaming and taking the fan experience to a whole new level to mobile devices. Streaming the PGA Championship live to the iPhone and iPod touch brings a personalized and high-quality experience to even more golf fans, no matter where they are. With increasingly better connectivity over WiFi, we've reached the point where high definition experiences are no longer limited to the PC."

Variable bit rate streaming benefits the consumer by enabling a high fidelity viewing experience at any bitrate - critical for mobile video as viewing conditions vary dramatically between carrier edge networks to 3G to WIFI. Using Akamai HTTP Streaming for iPhone and Inlet Technologies SpinnakerTM solution to deliver live and on-demand content, content owners can enable higher-quality video experiences at near HD bitrates over WiFi and 3G.

"Inlet works closely with Akamai to ensure our live encoding service for mobile applications works seamlessly across the Akamai network to provide for the optimal live video experience," said John Bishop, senior vice president of strategy and business development, Inlet Technologies. "Working with Akamai we are able to provide a smooth end to end process for content providers to make it easier to deliver next generation video experiences – such as variable bit rate streaming."

Columbia Journalism School to Enhance Election-Night Webcast with Streambox

Streambox announced that the Columbia University Journalism School is expanding its presidential election night coverage on November 4 to include a live streaming component in addition to its radio coverage. To help facilitate the live video webcast, a number of Streambox ACT-L3 Software Encoders will be deployed to student journalists on location. The Streambox solution will provide an easy-to-use and reliable means for students to gather live reports to supplement the upcoming election webcast as well as content for New Media and TV Broadcast during the course of the academic year.

The student journalists -- all graduate students - will be involved in producing Columbia's Election Website, designed to provide hands-on experience in all newsgathering and news production disciplines including print, radio/TV broadcast, and new media/web production. Armed with up to four laptops running the Streambox ACT-L3 Software Encoder, students will be able to capture and encode live video from field locations and transport it over low-bandwidth IP connections to the Journalism School's TV control room, where it will be output to a Flash server and streamed to the Election Website. Early testing of the Streambox system using 3G WiFi express cards has yielded transmission speeds as high as 800 Kbps.

"The Streambox solution helps our students gain a broader learning experience by letting them work hands-on with the kinds of systems they'll be using in the real world," said Craig Hettich, manager of broadcast technology for the Columbia University Journalism School. "By providing an affordable and easy-to-use solution for acquiring video from the field and getting it back to the studio for broadcast, Streambox is enhancing our ability to teach cutting edge news reporting. The beauty of the system is that it enables smaller news outlets to do large-scale productions and stream them to the web with the same ease as large news organizations."

In addition to streaming live video to the Election Website, the Columbia Journalism School will use the Streambox solution to incorporate live remote coverage into its spring "Nightly News" broadcasting course. "The ability to include live newsgathering and reporting in this course will give it a whole new dimension," said Hettich.

He added, "For this ambitious project, and the kind of newsgathering our students are doing, Streambox is the only game in town. It's a big plus that the software-based encoder runs on standard-off-the-shelf laptops without the need for any hardware other than a Streambox decoder and possibly video management systems back at the studio. Also, the solution delivers broadcast video from the moment you plug it in."

"The Columbia Journalism School's commitment to give its students authentic real-life experience by using best-of-class teaching tools is one more example of why the school has such a stellar reputation," said Bob Hildeman, chairman and CEO at Streambox. "We're pleased that Columbia has selected Streambox's IP-centric newsgathering platform to play a key role in that effort."